🛰️ Mission
Sojourner
The first wheels on another planet, the size of a microwave.
- Launched
- 4 December 1996, 29 years ago
- Landed
- 4 July 1997
- Worked for
- 3 months, until 27 September 1997
- Built by
- NASA
- Where it is
- Still sitting in Ares Vallis on Mars, where it stopped answering
- Best known for
- Proved a rover could work on another planet at all, and found rocks that had been rounded by running water
Did you know?
- It weighed 10.6 kg and drove about a hundred metres in total — never more than a dozen metres from its lander.
- It was designed to last a week. It worked for twelve, and stopped only when the lander that relayed its signals went quiet.
Where it went
Mars
The red planet, with the tallest volcano in the solar system.
More NASA photos of SojournerStraight from NASA’s image library, in the app
Explore more
All of missions
Hubble Space Telescope
Thirty-six years above the weather, and still working.
James Webb Space Telescope
A golden mirror that sees the first galaxies in infrared.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The telescope that shows what is hot and violent.
Spitzer Space Telescope
Sixteen years of infrared, through dust that hides everything else.
Kepler
Stared at one patch of sky and found thousands of planets.
TESS
Kepler’s successor, watching the whole sky for planets.